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Experience Quotes


"Not everyone can experience what other people can... That's why movies come out... films and books... and short stories and novels..."


"Conviction without experience makes for harshness."


"You have not lived until you have fled a city in a country where you do not speak the language in the middle of the night."


"Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently."


"She had understood before she had ever dreamed of a city such as this, where every texture, every color, leapt out at you, where every fragrance was a drug, and the air itself was something alive and breathing."


"We knew we did not want to record at Impulse Studios again, after the experience of recording in a 'real' studio in London for the Radio One session we did."



"If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don't admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don't do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one."


"We just had a near-life experience!"


"Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing."


"Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant."


"I feel like I'm going to HURL. Which, even if I wanted to do, I couldn't do, because I haven't eaten. I can't even drag myself out of my room. And while I'd be able to muster the strength to roundhouse Fang until he begged for MERCY, I'de be mush around an Eraser."


"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience."


"I've shepherded a good many people through their lives, I've baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches."


"Any experience can be transformed into something of value."


"...and where the Ferris wheel carried its passengers high and brought them low and raised them high and brought them low again, as if it were not merely a carnival ride but also a metaphor for the basic pattern of human experience."


"Things hit a limit, though, when I was set upon by a pickpocket in a baker's shop. I didn't notice that I was being set upon by a pickpocket, which I am glad of, because I like to work only with professionals."


"For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most people get to know only one corner of their room, a window seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down."


"Tonight is going to be a big night, like any other night, because certain 10 million Americans will not be able to sleep well tonight."


"Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience."


"It's true what they say, you know. First fuck. First love. First kill. You never forget your first."


"Mr Lorry asks the witness questions:Ever been kicked? Might have been.Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord."


"My experience with Buffalo Springfield was that they did not rehearse."



"People get passionate about a song. It's been my experience if you put out radio candy, something commercial, it doesn't sell records."


"Because...Beacause it's so good, and there's only one chance to read a book for the first time, and I want it to last. That experience. I'd finish it in a day otherwise, and that'd be like...like eating a carton of ice cream in one sitting. Too much richness over too quickly. This way, I can draw it out. Make the book last longer. Savor it. I have to since they don't come out that often."


"I'm afraid concerts spoil people for everyday life."


"The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure."


"In dream consciousness... we make things happen by wishing them, because we are not only the observer of what we experience but also the creator."


"Trust the one with experience, not the one with ideas."


"Life is an experimental field. You can explore by faith."


"To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exlcude yourself from the true enjoyment of it."


"An earthquake is such fun when it is over."


"As Steve draws me closer to the band, all I can see is a frenzied mass of seething, writhing people, like a many-headed sea snake, grinding, waving their arms, stamping their feet, jumping. No rules, just energy - so much energy, you could harness it; I bet you could power Portland for a decade. It is more than a wave. It's a tide, an ocean of bodies."


"I picked up a snake once. In Italy.""Why did you do that?""For a bet.""Was it poisonous?""We didn't know. That was the point of the bet.""Did it bite you?""Of course.""Why of course?""It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?"


"I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a "learning experience." Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a "learning experience." It makes me feel less stupid."


"It is a dangerous thing to substitute reading or writing for living. Live first, then write."


"Every memory becomes a golden treasure to us when we have lived our lives with tragedy and triumphs, sadness and happiness."


"Experience is true, but not the lessons it teaches."


"We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience."


"Experience kills out ur weaknesses."


"So what do you think the physical effect was?"Roman Laughed. "Buddy," he said, "she was tripping."


"Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl - as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response."


"Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description."


"Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!"


"I would have preferred someone else to have been in charge of rescuing this story, but once again life has taught me that my role is to be a witness, not the leading actor."


"Many writers write because they've been there, seen that, did it and burnt their fingers."


"When we observe how some people know how to manage their experiences--their insignificant, everyday experiences--so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while others--and how many there are!--are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet always remain on top, bobbing like a cork, then we are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much."



"Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another."


"The gum looked fresh. I sniffed it and it smelled all right. I licked it and waited for a while. When I did not die, I crammed it into my mouth: Wrigley's Double Mint."
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